Green. It is Your Favorite ColorGreen. It is Your Favorite Color

I attended the Everything Channel Virtual Trade Show, "Green Day: Capitalizing on Going Green." This "virtual" event was good for the "experience" but not great. The content was excellent but some misunderstandings about energy and sustainability still prevail.

I attended the Everything Channel Virtual Trade Show, "Green Day: Capitalizing on Going Green." This "virtual" event was good for the "experience" but not great. The content was excellent but some misunderstandings about energy and sustainability still prevail.The biggest is that in the coming months, states are going to offer incentives to large enterprises to reduce their energy consumption. The fact is large enterprise and industrial users have less incentive to effectively reduce their energy footprint to the tune of going beyond the data center. The reason is simple. Utility companies don't penalize large enterprise and industrial users for using too much energy. Instead, these customers get bigger discounts on their usage.

Unless the utility companies remove the reward for enterprises using more or too much power, the incentive to save energy greatly diminishes.

Some key comments from the event:

Rich Lochner, VP, IT Optimization & System Software, IBM - "Green is a good overall business measure in efficiency."

Bobby Guhasarkar, Sr. Manager of Product Marketing, Juniper Networks - "Converge the boxes into one box, less boxes, less power utilization."

David Prinster, Sr. National Account Manager, VMware - "Energy costs are rising; Power constraints & outages are real; Environmental impact & concerns are growing."

Vendor Energy Calculators

* Nortel

* VMware

One of the virtual conferences was aimed at helping customers reduce energy costs. This is a theme that I do think will get a lot of mileage in the next couple of years. A few surveys noted that over 80% of CEOs surveyed do think that energy and sustainability are important competitive factors for their companies. Still, there are those that don't.

Top of the list in the IT space is server virtualization, since servers and storage suck up around 50% of power in the data center. The lesson is it's okay to go after the big hits but, if you neglect the little ones like lighting - it will come back to haunt you. Lighting generates heat and heat necessitates the need for cooling and cooling requires more electricity.